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Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Toy Story: Buddy Packs (UPDATED)

The Toy Story "Buddy Pack" collection from Mattel has been one of my favorite lines to collect over the last few years. These came in 2010 with the release of Toy Story 3 and new ones have been released periodically up until last year. I knew I would be collecting them as soon as I saw them back when they were released. I've loved little kid version ("buddy" style) figures since Hasbro released their Star Wars "Galactic Heroes" collection back in 2001 (If you're familiar with those, you kind of know what style I'm talking about) and I'm excited to give these to my kids someday!

These are really fun. I especially like them because of the so many characters that have never been available to collect in any other way (like Snake, Robot, Hockey Puck, Shark, Mr. Spell and Bookworm, to name a few).

There are also many fun playsets, vehicles and gift sets that go along with this collection of figures, which I love! If you haven't seen my additional posts from this collection, visit the links below before moving on:

The first few here, we have: Slinky, Rocky, Grappling Hook/Utility Belt Buzz, Rex, Jessie and the Critters, Zurg, Lenny, Lost Hat Woody and Shark (Note: the way these things are packaged, which is the only thing about them that kind of made it hard to collect, is that you have to get repeats of some characters to get ones you don't have. So below I'll just be listing each character once, despite them showing up again).

Continued below there's a couple more packaged ones and some that I bought loose: Hockey Puck, Mr. Spell, Scud (an exclusive to the Pop Open Playworld Playset), Bo Peep's sheep, Hamm, Chunk (with bad mood face) and a few Pizza Planet Aliens.

The last Buddy Packs seen below are from the next year, hence the change to the packaging design. There's: Dolly, Waving Woody, Buzz in Flying Pose, RC, Trixie, Woody with Sunnyside Hang-glider, Zurg with Ion Blaster, Barbie in Space Suite and the Bookworm.

And then we have this pack, which I just got! It's a Target exclusive gift set called "Sid's Room." I got it because it's the only way Baby Face and Rocket Buzz were ever released and I'm really excited to finally have these as part of the collection! How cool would it be to have Buddy versions of the rest of Sid's mutant toys?

UPDATE 4/08/15-

Etch with Al in chicken suite drawing has been added to my collection! A big thanks to my wife Brita who was got this for me for this past Easter.

So there we have it!

Roughly 67 unique Toy Story characters/poses!

About 15 figures repeated/repacked

82 figures here total

There are still several out there that I don't have (a few of them exclusive to gift packs), including the exclusive Buzz, Woody and Hamm from The Hawaiian Vacation Set (I thought the Disney figure pack had more characters from the short so I got that instead), Evil Dr. Porkchop, Alien with eye patch, Mean Lotso, flocked Bullseye, Glitter Stretch, Green Army Men Tank, Fuzzy Lotso and Shiny Buttercup (all seen below, images collected from Google search and are not my own). As an avid "completist", I may need to track the rest down to finish my collection!

This really is an awesome collection that you need to track down if you haven't already (there are lots of other gift packs with multiple characters out there to help you get jump-started with collecting these). Again, I just love how almost every single main toy/main background toy from the Toy Story films is represented from Andy's room, Bonnie's room and Sunnyside.

The only main characters missing from this collection that I wish Mattel would have made are: The Monkey from Sunnyside, Mr. Mike, the Troikas, Roly Poly clown, Troll, barrel of monkeys, the rest of Sid's mutant toys and Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (not included in this collection because of rights issues, so I've heard).

One final note: Interestingly, I found this unreleased "Tour Guide Barbie" image on the back of one of the Buddy Pack packages For whatever reason, she was cancelled. Wonder why?